Should you get in the mood to read a book on public transit for nonspecialists, I unhesitatingly recommend Jarrett Walker’s “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.” Though Portland-based, the transit consultant Walker makes many a clear observation about Los Angeles, its transit, its communities, and its lives. Toward the end of the book, he imagines the tantalizing street of one day this city’s future, which “feels more like a Parisian boulevard in many ways, including generous sidewalks, shade trees, and of course a transit lane” in which “bus and streetcar technologies have converged into a long snakelike vehicle lined with many doors, so that people can flow on and off as easily as they do on a subway,” which is “guided by optical technology” and which, “mostly transparent above waist height,” “feels like a continuation of the sidewalk.”
That day, alas, has yet to come. “I thought about the bus in Los Angeles,” narrates Richard, the hapless young Englishman in Richard Rayner’s novel “Los Angeles Without a Map.” “It was the way to travel. Once I had waited for over two hours at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevard when a driver with a cowboy hat and and a drawling voice like Harrison Ford decided he was sick of his job. His solution to the problem was to stop the bus and make everyone get off.” Richard goes on to tell of enraged aisle-prowlers, robberies by prepubescent thugs, and passing motorists shouting “Lo-sers, asshole losers!.” His blonde, über-Angeleno girlfriend asks him if he really likes riding the bus. “It’s democratic,” he replies. She snorts and asks whether democracy arrives on time. “‘Never had to wait more than five minutes,’ I lied.”
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Post a Comment